WHENEVER YOU LIST COLLECTED WRITINGS or ESSAYS, YOU SHOULD LIST THE *CONTENTS* OF THE BOOK, so that buyers can compare other published collections of the same author's work. I tried to enter this in the CORRECTIONS, but the format was so rigid I couldn't just comment (why don't you change that?), and this was the only way I could see to get a message to you. Thank you.

Voltaire (1694-1778)- glamorous, irreverent, immensely successful in his time - was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived: His collected works comprise 50 volumes. In order to get to know this most famous writer of the Enlightenment one needs a guide who picks examples from this immense body of work. Today Voltaire's wonderful little novel "Candide" tends to overshadow the rest of his literary activity, and in my opinion that is a great pity. This selection will introduce you to the Voltaire I love best: The witty philosopher of common sense and tolerance. In his essays he manages to express the ideas of the enlightenment in an elegant clarity which is unsurpassed in any literature. - Don't let others tell you who Voltaire is; feel the passion and the wisdom of one of the greatest writers ever.

I think this book gives a very good account of Voltaire's life and offers many an insight into the writer's views on, notably, the Britons. It's -to say the least - amusing to view seventeenth-century English society through the eyes of an eminent French intellectual.

What shocked me above all, reading this book was the complete lack of objectivity manifested by the author. It seems Napoleon can do no wrong and this is emphasized by the constant need for the author to justify the Emperor's actions, by way of asking rather childish questions and making easy assertions, bordering on sophism. The overall feeling we get is Mr. Weider's need for historical "revenge" and the need to clean Napoleon's name. The autor wants to make us see Napoleon as a martyr, a man who was not a conqueror and made war out of strict necessity. This book is neither intended for neophytes, as it glances too rapidly over key historical moments, nor is it intended for experts, because of its biaised approach to the main protagonist and simplistic approach to events. The writing style is dry, almost newspaper-like and fails to carry the reader. Finally, although Mr. Weider theory of assassination is interesting, recent discoveries have discarted his theory. Overall, a deception.

I find Napoleon fascinating and the book excellent. From what I read, I certainly now believe Napoleon was misunderstood and his death misdiagnosed. Ben Weider has changed history forever with his groundbreaking evidence that Napoleon was murdered and his research shows that there is still much to learn about Napoleon. I learned a great deal about not only Napoleon, one of the world's leading men, but of the happenings in Europe during his era. When I first saw this book available for sale, I could not wait to read it. I am really pleased that I bought it!!

Napoleon: The Man Who Shaped Europe by Ben Weider helped me understand Napoleon better than any other book. It is so clearly written and very compelling, I just couldn't put it down. Numerous biographies of Napoleon are available, but this work is the most straightforward, convincing biography I've ever read. Napoleon Bonaparte's character and achievements have always divided critics and commentators, but in this new book by Ben Weider, I felt I have "met" a Napoleon that is totally different from all the other books I've read. Weider has established his credentials as one of the most evocative of popular historians. It's a must read!!

Let the publisher be your guide.

It's by Penguin Press -- it's for someone who's browses a half-price book store and gets the idea that some familiarity with pre-socratic philsophy is something they want to add to their lives.

It lacks the critical richness of other works (I enjoy Patricia Curd et. al's ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY) -- so if you want depth, you won't find it here.

I read this book as part of an ancient greek philosophy class and I hated virtually everything on the reading list. This book was part of said curs-ed list.

I don't profess to be an expert in ancient Greek philosophy (or any other kind, for that matter), but I have wondered what roots Plato, via his Socrates, had drawn upon for his splendid work in a wide variety of subjects. This book is a solid introduction to those roots and cheap at the price.

The Pre-Socratics are important because they provide the first tenuous link in a great shift from explanation via religious belief to explanation via rational inquiry. These men, scattered throughout the Greek world and across several centuries, looked at the world around them and tried to construct the "first principles" that would explain how that world came to be and what it was made of. Democritus, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Parmenides and the many other authors presented here aren't household names, but they are the foundation of our view of the world both as physical object and mental representation.

It is striking how much of this thought will sound very familiar to anyone with exposure to current physics or, say, Heideggerian philosophy. The Pre-Socratics have much to say to our culture in particular despite the vast differences in intellectual frame of reference between the two.

That said, this is a good starting point for studying the Pre-Socratics. Johnathan Barnes has worked scrupulously to overcome a seemingly insurmountable historigraphic roadblock -- the fact that most of these philosophers are known to us only third-hand by quotation in works produced centuries after their deaths by Roman and medieval scholars. His documentation of the textual sources of the material is very helpful, although its arrangment on the page is often confusing and we're not sure whether we're listening to Barnes or one of the intermediary scholars.

This book needs more historical context and more intellectual context that will help neophytes like myself understand the impact these philosophers have had on Western thought. Penguin usually does a good job of supplying just such an essay with each book. Barnes does have a short introduction, but it's not enough.

These caveats aside, I have no qualms about recommending this collection for use in the classroom, especially if done so under the guidance of an instructor who is well-grounded in this era of Greek history. Those of us coming to these works later in life may want to supplement this with other, more scholarly interpretations and analyses.

Our present knowledge of the Presocratic philosophers is all second-hand: it consists of attributions made in later classical literature by a wide variety of authors, from pagans, like Aristotle and Iamblichus, to Christians, like Clement and Hippolytus. This book gives the reader who has been tantalized by these fragmentary citations a chance to view these quotes surrounded by the contexts in which they are preserved. That is both the strength and the bane of this volume. For instance, it is interesting to note how often Heraclitus is referred to as "obscure", but then, how much of what is attributed to him was actually said by him, how much does the citation represent the quoter's bias or training, and in what context or order were the sayings originally delivered? We will never know. So, if you have a passing acquaintance with the sayings of Zeno, Pythagoras, Empedocles et al., this may be the book to draw you deeper into the mysteries. The beginner may be merely mystified by the Presocratic palimpsest.

The priest Pierre Froment, hero of Zola's novels "Lourdes" and "Rome", is back in Paris, struggling with his lack of religious faith. Froment is surrounded by a nervous city because of the treat of Anarchist attacks, a city divided between extremes of grinding poverty and irresponsible, corrupt wealth.

This is an angry novel. Zola tilts at political cynicism, the duplicity and insincerity of organised religion, and the social and economic inequities of the time.

Much of the novel is really a rehash of themes Zola explored in his "Rougon-Macquart" novel cycle - so there's little original here, and at its worst, the style becomes annoyingly preachy.

There is an interesting sub-plot in which Pierre's brother, Guillaume, develops a new explosive powder of enormous power - many of the issues raised by Zola about how that invention should be best put to use seemed to me to anticipate debates about nuclear power.

Paris is the third volume of the Three Cities trilogy that began with Lourdes and continued with Rome. Published in 1898, Paris is Zola's summation of the 19th Century and his predictions and hopes for the 20th Century. In this work Zola gives a splendid portrayal of social life in Paris at the end of the century. He takes us into the lives of men and women of the upper classes, the working class, and even revolutionary Anarchists. This work is of particular interest to readers today who face the future of a new Milennium since Zola looks at the accomplishments of his century and projects his hopes for a new century ruled by Reason and Justice. We can see how we of the 20th Century have failed and succeeded in bringing Zola's vision of the future to life. Zola spent his career portraying the 19th Century France through the lives of his characters. In this final work of the Century, he uses his story telling powers to create a portrait of the time through the lives of his characters.

This book is composed of excerpts from Emile Male's more weighty tomes on French religious art. Unfortunately, the result is a patchwork of ideas that are not well connected and not clearly explained. A reader interested in Gothic art, for example, would learn more reading Male's more complete "The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century." "Gothic Image" is longer and perhaps more detailed than "Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century," but "Gothic Image" is easier to read because the ideas are presented more completely.

This book is indispensable to the serious art historian

Three works mark Rousseau: Confessions, Social Contract, and Inequality. "Emile" is a tedious tome that espouses at great, if not banal, length the issues he has more adequately and eloquently addressed in his major works. The premise is simple: Let nature be the educator. Imagine a kid dropped in the middle of Yosemite National Park, revisit him at age 20, and the kid will know everything he needs to know. Now, you know the substance of the book. If you think nature alone without a preceptor or teacher other than nature alone is sufficient, you'll be bored with the redudancies and polemics against "this" and "that" institution that has developed over the centuries. The core of the book is a vain effort to show that these institutions have corrupted the student, and ergo, society. If only nature could be allowed to "speak," so to speak, then men everywhere would be better off. Right!

Rousseau himself had five children. He deposited all of them at the door of an orphanage in Paris, against the protests of their mother and his mistress. Modern historians estimate that the mortality rate at such an institution was nearly 100 per cent, so it is no exaggeration to state that Rousseau packed all of his own children off to die in a home for foundlings.

That such a monster would then turn around and proceeed to pretend to instruct the rest of the world in the art of raising children -- well, it's just one of those things to take the breath away.

Heersink's distillation of the "essence" of Rousseau's Emile is so bazaar, tendentious and misleading that I am left to wonder whether he has read a single page of the book that he finds so tedious and banal. Nature, for Rousseau, is not the vast open spaces of the great outdoors; it is rather, the totality of created beings such as they exist prior to their being worked over by human artifice, and, in particular, the inner, inborn nature of human beings before it has been deflected, distorted, and perverted through their reciprocal, social interaction. In Emile, Rousseau sets out to show how, even in the midst of the corrupting forces of society, it might still be possible to raise a healthy, fully-actualized, harmonious individual; a human being whose inner nature is developed and realized in its potentialities. Such an education is not possible under the instruction of trees, bears and geysers, but only through the most exquisite attentiveness of the tutor, who, through constant vigilance, tries to develop the mind and sentiments of his pupil without giving a foothold to the social passions that make children vain, greedy, manipulative, and deceitful. This requires, above all, that at every moment, the child should learn to judge its actions by their natural effects, and feel its own will limited by the resistance of the nature without it, rather than by the will of other human beings. For whereas the child will submit easily to the force of nature, it will do everything to overcome the force that oppose it once it regards them as expressions of a human will.
I disagree with Rousseau about many things, even about the most fundamental issues. Most of all, I do not think that what it means to be human should be thought limited by a pre-existing, and pristine human nature. Yet I also believe that, now more than ever, we must take Rousseau seriously, and read him rigorously - not merely as an antiquarian piece, but as a profound challenge to our conceits and myopias. There can be no true democracy without citizens who are free not only in the eyes of the law, but in their own eyes; yet we cannot recognize others as free, unless we have eyes for our own freedom. This demands nothing less than a liberal education. In place of this, we have entrusted our children to those whose seek only their own gain and who profit by tapping into human desires, dissociating them from the whole, and crystalizing them into a form in which it seems as though they could be satisfied through some given commodity. As a result, we have become, in the words of my friend, the social critic Dan A. Leythorn, "a nation of slaves - to our desires, to our whims, to money, to power, to each other"

A more accurate translation of this book's title would be "The Joy Of Living", but a more appropriate one would be "The Valley Of Tears", and this was considered by Zola before being discarded in favour of his final, deeply ironic choice. The book is a non-stop catalogue of the blows that life hands out to a sweet orphan girl sent to live with distant relatives in a seaside village. Even the servant of the household feels obliged, in the end, to commit suicide because of the treatment suffered by the girl, who is without doubt Zola's most sweet-natured creation and sails through the whole story with her caring instincts completely untouched. Everything is well described, as always, but for me the story is only interesting if you want to find out what happened to Pauline, the daughter of Lisa in "Le Ventre De Paris/The Underbelly Of Paris", and in the Rougon-Macquart saga this book is like the low point on a suspension bridge between the twin towers of "Au Bonheur Des Dames/The Ladies' Paradise" and "Germinal". Fans of Monty Python's Flying Circus who have seen the film "The Life Of Brian" might well recall the song sung on the cross by Brian "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" and that just about sums up what I felt after reading this gloomy tale.

Of all the characters spread throughout twenty Rougon-Macquart novels Pauline Quenu is by far the most sweet. In spite of occasional thriftiness, which is, perhaps, the result of being brought up by her mother Lisa Quenu ("La Ventre de Paris/the Underbelly of Paris"), she is possessed with boundless generosity. She sacrifices her money and her personal life to care for her extended family. Along with that, she gives money and food to poor children. She suffers from occasional fits of anger, which is something that was, probably, passed down to her by her great-grandmother Adelaide Fouque ("la Fortune des Rougons/the Fortune of the Rougons"), but still she is in love with life. This zest for life necessitates all the action for the good of mankind. Her craving for knowledge and progress is not realized, however, because she devotes everything to caring for others.

Contrasted with Pauline is her cousin Lazare. He is angry at the entire world for not recognizing him. He attributes all his failures to some large conspiracy directed against him by people and circumstances. All his desires for knowledge and action fail. Be it medicine, music or building a dyke - everything is destined to be unsuccessful, because Lazare lacks Pauline's zest for life.

By contrasting the two, one arrives at a conclusion that science and knowledge, a desire to participate in something creative and zest for live are all inseparable.

Well, live and learn as they say. I always thought of Emile Zola as one of the greats, the author of such classics as "Germinal" and "Nana", the hero of the Dreyfus trial, and so on. But it seems that back in the early days, before he bounded onto the world stage, Zola produced a fairly large number of potboilers. Who knew ? He's always strong on atmosphere, on the details of 19th century French life-the parlors, the inns, the gardens, the more decadent parts of the city-and he's a master of human psychology. Still, as I read through MADELEINE FERAT, I had this sinking feeling that I had fallen into a Harlequin romance of bygone years. The lurid details, the many lyrical interludes, the melodrama, corny dialogue, [Example: after the death of his closest friend, the hero says to the heroine on p.71 "The dear fellow ! Now he has gone from us, he is no more, and I am an orphan. But he will always live in me, I have lost my brother......Now, Madeleine, I have only you." ] and above all, the fantastic coincidences that reminded me so much of Bombay movies, put me off. If I needed this sort of book, I could find a million at any local yard sale, embossed in gold and silver cardboard. Zola is a name to reckon with, but he probably wrote this for a bit of cash. (He definitely didn't write it for the movies.) Also, I remember as I review this book that Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" was held up from publication in America for many years because the publishers felt it was too close to pornographic---all because she lived with a man she didn't marry. When I read it in the 1970s, the word 'pornographic' certainly never came to mind ! The Victorian prudery of British and American literature in the 1860s and '70s (not to mention later) is well known. So the frankly sexual imagery and situations found in Zola's work, hardly remarkable now, must have been extremely titillating and exciting to young people in those days. Zola would have been guaranteed a large audience.

One very interesting thing emerged. The book is based on the idea that a woman's first sexual experience leaves an indelible imprint. So, if she does not marry her first lover, it is futile for her to try to have a normal life outside that first relationship. (p.164) "If her heart no longer loved Jacques, the fatal memory of her flesh was unchanged." And even more amazing, readers of the time apparently could swallow the idea that thinking of a former lover during the sex act could make the resulting child look like the non-present lover ! This, intones Zola, by a psychological process still unknown. If this sort of stuff is your bread and butter, you are going to love MADELEINE FERAT. Otherwise, give it a miss.

Shame is not an emotion one usually associates with a Zola character, especially when that character is driven to commit suicide because of it. We are a long way from the "life on any terms" message of the later works. Otherwise, this second novel by Zola contains many of the themes that were to come to fruition in his great masterpieces and is a big improvement on his first as far as character portrayal is concerned. "Madeleine Férat" is a proper book, rather than a movie script. As a purely naturalist work it is a step backwards, because the characters are not really playthings of their environment in the way that those in the first novel are - not to mention the creatures in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Nowadays, the story's ending must seem far-fetched and dated, though it may well have seemed very moving up to the end of, say, the 1950s. The shame felt by the heroine at marrying her first lover's best friend is understandable up to a point, but despite Zola's efforts it is too inconsistent with the strong-mindedness he has given her in the earlier chapters. It would be interesting, too, to hear what modern feminists think of his theory that a woman bears the indelible psychological and pathological imprint of her first lover. However, this book is a rewarding read because it shows Zola still seeking an artistic direction for his literary career, and for this reason alone it deserves to be better known than it is. Worse stories than this have found their way on to the screen, and in his own writings Zola was to get worse before getting better and finding the niche that brought him lasting fame.

The "Enchanting Children's Tale of Courage" review above is listed under the wrong book. The book the reviewer refers to is actually a completely different book titled "Momo," and is written by Michael Ende, not Amile Ajar. The Momo by Amile Ajar is not a "beautifully written" story about a young girl who goes against social norms to make the world a better place. It is a story about a young boy in France who lives in a foster home for children of prostitutes, and acts out by shitting all over the house and encouraging the other kids to do so too. While this may be your cup of tea, it's not likely to inspire children. Or maybe it is, in which case I'd be very afraid of what it might inspire them to do.

Momo is a tale of a young girl who goes against social norms to make the world a better place. A story children will be inspired by, Momo captures the essence of the importance of life: To stand up for what is right, whether or not it is easy. Beautfully written, this book is a prize!

The French priest Pierre Froment, hero of Zola's novel "Lourdes", arrives in Rome seeking an audience with the Pope. The reason for this is that Froment's book "New Rome" has been placed on the Papal Index, and Froment wants the Pope to intercede in order to get the book removed from the Index.

Froment is frustrated by the inertia of the conservative Papal bureaucracy and with the ins and outs of Italian and Church politics. At times, the novel felt like a work by Kafka (a pre-echo of Kafka, you might say) in that Froment is lost amid a seemingly meaningless and endless process: the Church absorbs his efforts.

What really made me struggle with the novel though was Zola's lack of focus - had he concentrated on Froment's experiences,it would have been a better novel, but he meandered for very long stretches: his descriptions of Rome become travelogues, the main plot just disappears. There are other long rambling passages too, for example on Church history, which although not irrelevant to the context of the story, go on far too long, and there is a pot-boiler of a sub-plot about two "star-crossed lovers".

In all, a disappointment compared to "Lourdes".

Rome is the second book of a trilogy that started with Lourdes and concludes with Paris. Often called the Three Cities trilogy, the books could also be called Faith, Hope, and Charity. Rome picks up the story of a disillusioned priest as he goes to Rome to defend his book which is to be placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The story explores his hope for a new Christianity that will meet the needs of modern society and his confrontation with a religious organization unable to change with the times. Zola's critical description of Papal bureaucracy will not endear this work to devout Catholics, but his description of the inner workings of the Vatican is informative and fascinating.